D2: Remembering and Re-Envisioning Steve Schwarze's Environmental Melodrama

Steve Schwarze published “Environmental Melodrama” in the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 2006. Positive critical response quickly followed. The essay won the 2007 Christine L. Oravec Award for scholarship in environmental communication awarded by the Environmental Communication Division of the National Communication Association. COCE held a forum discussing the essay (2007). The essay has since been extensively cited by scholars and “environmental melodrama” has become a key term in the environmental communication discipline. Seventeen years after its publication and upon the passing of Steve Schwarze, this panel invites scholars who have used his work to revisit the “Environmental Melodrama” in order to explore how the concept has been applied and extended in the field and what it can tell us about current environmental issues and the discipline of environmental communication. The panel addresses the conference theme of “many voices, one planet” by bringing together scholars from different backgrounds and topic areas to reflect on the role of melodrama in their own work, and in seeking to understand how environmental groups and their challengers invoke and adapt melodrama for their own purposes.